Praise for the second edition of The Design of Sites “In my worldwide IBM marketing role, I have the benefit of working with some of the finest international interactive agencies and internal Web teams. As I read The Design of Sites, [I see] the insight from years of professional advice has been put to paper. Nowhere have I seen such a practical, effective, and easy-to-use book to solve and avoid Internet design issues. I keep a copy of the book handy to remind me of the things I forgot and to gain fresh perspectives. It never fails to deliver.”-John Cilio, marketing manager, IBM System x & z Storage Synergy

“The Design of Sites artfully brings forward the original intent of Christopher Alexander’s pattern language into the

This is a book that shows how far website designing has come, since the early days of the mid 90s. Back then, texts on the subject often focused on the technical mechanics. Heavy on HTML, explaining what all those tags did. Plus much details on how to run the web servers. Those were texts for programmers.

Duyne and his co-authors give a higher level discourse. One better attuned to a true design approach. And germane to people of different skill sets than programmers. While there is still some discussion at the HTML level, nowadays you can safely assume that much of that degree of detail can be safely handed off, after the design (or a first cut of it) is done.

The text spans many aspects of a website. Like having a consistent visual style across all the pages. Or perhaps distinct styles, but each within a clear subset of pages. And the developer should always try to keep in mind what a visitor might expect. For this, a logical and easy to understand layout of the pages relative to each other is key. Along with an accompanying site map. Granted, if you are just starting out with a small site, the map may be unnecessary. But if you have ambitions for more, then designing a logical subdivision of the pages is advised.

You probably want search engines to list your site. And list it prominently. Where this applies whether you have a corporate site or a non-profit site. So a chapter offers several hints for search engine optimisation. For one thing, try having meaningful titles for each page. But perhaps the best thing you can do, if you want other websites to link to yours, is simply to write the text as fluently and interestingly as you can. Make visitors WANT to read your pages. All the technical SEO steps are important, but ultimately secondary compared to this.

The book also warns of phishing attacks against your site. Perhaps inevitable if you will be doing ecommerce, and if your site becomes popular. One key piece of advice is NOT to outsource your email subscriptions to a third party site. Not only can it make some subscribers suspicious, but it increases their vulnerability to phishing messages.

The amount of web site design knowledge presented in this text is almost unbelievable. Almost every aspect of website design is covered. If you’re looking for a ‘implementation how-to’ book, look elsewhere. This text is more of a ‘design how-to’ text, and it does an unparalleled job of that.

I was hoping this book would have more fundamental design insights that could be applied to various situations. However, I found it to be a bit too obvious with samples and ideas based on common websites. The design points were ones anyone who browses the web could have figured out on their own. Essentially the book would use popular websites as models and say do your sites like this. There was no obvious indicator that these were even patterns per se. Just that these sites are popular so they must be the best way of doing it. That didn’t seem particularly convincing when most sites design changes every 2-3 years. It also didn’t highlight the shortcomings and tradeoffs you must make when choosing a particular pattern. Essentially this book wasn’t much use to me since the websites I work on don’t fit any of their models. I was hoping for a book where you can apply *fundamental* design patterns to all types of situations not just the specific ones mentioned (e.g. The best way to format entry fields, when to use a pop up versus show everything at once, how mnay items to show in a list, when to use pagination versus list scrolling, and the why’s and hows and tradeoffs and all that stuff we consider when designing a web site.) I was hoping for something along the lines of the Microsoft style guide I read several years ago, but catered for the web.